4 Questions About John Mulaney’s Perplexing Netflix Show
Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney is as perplexing as it is intermittently entertaining. Mulaney is proving himself to be the anti-Jimmy Fallon, refusing to ingratiate himself with either his audience or the citizen phoners whose ridiculed calls make up much of his show. Everybody’s Live reminds me of stories about Andy Kaufman reading a copy of The Great Gatsby to a comedy club audience. It’s hilarious that Kaufman would attempt such an audacious stunt, but I wouldn’t have wanted to have bought a ticket.
With two episodes of Everybody’s Live in the bank, I have a few questions about where Mulaney is headed…
Why Is the Show Live?
Don't Miss
Everybody’s Live could get better immediately if it simply edited out the stuff that doesn’t work. But like Saturday Night Live, the show where Mulaney got his start, there’s a stubborn refusal to trade real-time spontaneity for better content. “It feels like there’s more stakes,” Mulaney told CBS Sunday Morning about why his show is live. “It’s dangling from the cliff the whole time.”
Why So Many Guests?
It’s not that Mulaney has so many more guests than other late-night talk shows — it’s that they’re all talking at once. Last night, Ben Stiller, Nick Kroll, Quinta Brunson and a cruise industry expert had to vie for conversational openings with Mulaney and sidekick Richard Kind. When a caller phones in for advice, six celebrities trip over one another figuring out whose turn it is to talk.
How Long Will Mulaney Stick with the Call-in Gimmick?
Kudos to Mulaney for taking big swings, thumbing his nose at the traditional late-night format. But building so much of his one-hour show around viewer phone calls turns America into comedy writers — and we’re not that funny. In the first episode, a caller who admitted he might need to live out of his van was comedy turned tragedy. Mulaney had to continually cut off this week’s callers about their cruise ship experiences — stories that are funny around Aunt Carol’s dinner table aren’t great fodder for a national TV show. This should be a segment, not a show.
Is This All for John Mulaney’s Amusement?
Mulaney seems to be taking great glee in Netflix’s aggravation over early shows. After finding out about Everybody’s Live’s lackluster guest lists, a Netflix exec scolded the comic, according to Vulture, “This is not the show we sold!”
Other than the show’s uneven weirdness, it’s hard to understand why Netflix is so perplexed. Mulaney is doing pretty much the same show he did for the streamer last year when he called it Everybody’s in L.A. But Mulaney is delighting in the behind-the-scenes chaos.
“It was great to see someone kind of apoplectic,” he explained. “Like, ‘Oh honey, do you know what you bought?’ And then they go, ‘We don’t even understand what this rundown means!’”
Mulaney seems to be doing a Norm Macdonald, purposely telling anti-jokes for his own shits and giggles. “Whether something’s good or people like it is so ephemeral,” he told Vulture. “I can protect myself by acting like we just think it’s weird, and that way you can’t criticize it in the same way.”
